When I first heard about the leak of the “Panama Papers” I wonder if North Korea was using these off shore companies to launder money like many other politically connected individuals around the world were doing? Sure enough it has now been confirmed that North Korea has been linked to the Panama Papers:
The Panama legal firm at the heart of a massive data leak kept clients who were subject to international sanctions, documents show.
Mossack Fonseca worked with 33 individuals or companies who have been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury, including companies based in Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.
One had links to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
The information comes from the leak of 11m of the company’s internal files.
Mossack Fonseca registers companies as offshore entities operated under its own name. This meant the identities of the real owners were hard to trace because they were kept out of public documents.
Some of the businesses were registered before international sanctions were imposed. But in several cases Mossack Fonseca continued to act as a proxy for them after they were blacklisted.
DCB Finance was established in 2006, with its owners and directors based in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. It was later put under sanctions by the US Treasury for raising funds for the North Korean regime and being linked to a bank helping to fund the regime’s nuclear weapons programme.
The leaked files reveal the owners of DCB Finance were a North Korean official, Kim Chol Sam and Nigel Cowie, a British banker who was also CEO of the sanctioned Daedong Credit Bank.
Mossack Fonseca appears to have overlooked that the owners and directors of the company were based in Pyongyang until it was contacted by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) authorities in 2010, inquiring about another company Mossack Fonseca had set up with directors in North Korea.
Mossack Fonseca resigned as agents for DCB Finance in September 2010. [BBC]
You can read much more at the link, It will be interesting to see what else comes out about the document leak involving North Korea.
